


oh, how we saw in each other everything

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, and they aren’t great at expressing it, it’s everyone, they’re a big stupid family and they love each other, this is a compilation of all my tumblr vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-11 10:33:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19107892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: the different ways the mighty nein find family in each other, and the times they realize it





	oh, how we saw in each other everything

**Author's Note:**

> a series of little moments i wrote about m9 while catching up and/or watching talks— like the one i did for yasha, but on a larger scale.  
> (they’re formatted a little differently from one another, but really isn’t that how it should be)  
> title is from gemini by the alabama shakes

Beau’s not jealous.

Fuckin’— of course not. She barely even likes these idiots.

 

It’s just that she knows they’re better than this dude and his stupid mercenary friends and she doesn’t want Yasha to waste her time.

That’s it.

 

(It’s just that Yasha’s been with them for almost a week, this time, and she’s starting to get used to seeing her downstairs in the morning or unceremoniously wringing out her matted hair into the washbasin in their room—she still sleeps on the floor, even though they’ve got enough money to shack up at the Pillow Fort for the rest of their stay in Zadash. All in separate rooms, even.)

 

And what a stupid name, too. Stubborn Stock.

Yeah, so maybe they named their group because they’re assholes and they like making fun of Caleb’s accent, and so they can pretend there’s more of them, but at least it’s not outright self-deprecating.

(And if Yasha left, left and found some other idiots to kill exploding sewer creatures with, well, then the name would be even less accurate.)

 

If Yasha leaves— like, _really_ leaves— well.

Beau knows what apathy feels like, low and sedentary in the belly, and it’s been gone for the first time since she was fifteen and kissing a girl for the first time in the alcove behind the garden.

 

It’s never worked out amazingly in the past, but she’s actually been thinking about what comes next for once. Thinking about being back on the road again, the horses fast burning the round bellies they’re certainly getting, this long in the Zadash stables. 

Dozing in the cart with Jester’s horns digging into her shoulder blades where she’s curled up against Beau like a cat or with Nott’s feet kicking out against her because Nott’s legs always twitch when she sleeps during the day. 

Getting high with Molly again, preferably on something that won’t give either of them magic tetanus.

Hoping, without dignifying it with words, that Yasha would be there for next.

 

Giving that small, weary smile when Nott presents her with a fistful of roadside wildflowers. Surreptitiously drinking Molly under the table, because she’s the only one who can, and carrying him upstairs like some strange, jeweled baby. Trimming Beau’s undercut when it gets too long and she starts to look like a retired show poodle, stiffening every time Jester hugs her before sinking back down and curling a long, pale arm around her shoulders, the former giving way to the latter a little faster each time. Raging and razing and making sure nothing gets through all of them and to Caleb in one piece. Being there, being with them.

Being a part of them.

 

And all those things, they curdle all sour on Beau’s tongue right when Yasha doesn’t turn them down. When she asks them for a fucking pamphlet, even after Darrow mentions their contract fighting “Xhorhasian terror.” 

Listen, she knows she could’ve handled the news that Yasha was from Xhorhas better— they all could have, except for Caleb, maybe— but she certainly never got into any of the usual town crier rhetoric.

 

(Gods, unless Yasha’s into that sort of thing? Beau can barely get a bead on her at all, but the closest thing to hurt pride she’s seen from Yasha was when she told Nott where she was from, with this soft, not-angry, not-sad weight to it.

She thinks she could make that work.)

 

Beau could kiss Fjord when he clears his throat and says “She’s spoken for,” in that Western, weirdly charismatic way he has about him. All stilted gentleman, standing there not-quite as tall as Yasha’s chin, the sort of calm that almost makes her forget about that one morning he woke up vomiting seawater. 

Almost.

 

It’s the first time she calls the Nein Yasha’s booker, and has to dig her nail into her palm to keep from grinning when Yasha doesn’t even flinch at that, calls them tough. 

 

That spike of joy dulls when Yasha keeps the coin with their symbol, but at the very least she’ll be with them in the Victory Pit. Another fight she’ll have with someone watching her back.

-

 

And that’s a problem, too, how much Beau’s getting used to fighting next to Yasha.

It’s always both of them, right up between the eyes of whatever’s trying to kill them at the moment.

 

There’s this language to fighting— real fighting, with blood and bruises— that no one else really speaks. Even Molly usually hangs back, spitting things in Infernal that make Jester giggle and making their enemies bleed from the eyes, darting in to swipe with those sullied, glowing swords and back out of range in the same breath unless things are going really wrong.

(He’s had to cast it on Yasha, too; Beau’s seen crimson bead at the corners of her strange, strange eyes even as she’s rolling to dodge heavy, Moon-touched swings, and it dries dark and menacing and awful against her pale, pale skin. Not that she’s not grateful; she just wishes Molly’s help wasn’t so sinister sometimes.)

Not that she can really blame Molly for dodging blows at that sharp face of his, but she and Yasha, they’re sharing the same violent, quiet impulse.

 

And much as Beau is a cue for raised eyebrows in the halls of the Cobalt Soul, she didn’t get her rep by being a bad fighter. She knows how to keep her head in combat.

It’s like seeing onto another plane, like she’s back in the dim, quiet sand pits, the snug underground chambers of the Zadash branch. Running on senses alone, instinct when she can’t see because the blindfold is a familiar weight, breaths even because for once she knows what to do, because there’s a correct response to everything and it’s stamped in her skin deeper than any rune.

Strike and cover, block and return. Something lashes at her and it meets with a crack against the bo or the long, thin bone of her outer forearm. It’s only too easy to expand the list of Things That Need Cover to include one more.

 

Fighting makes her calm enough to placidly watch Yasha live up to the silent command of wielding an executioner’s blade, to just as easily parry whatever moves in their direction, unaware of just about anything else. 

Just as vital, and even more dangerously, she can blink up at an incoming strike and know, with all the immediate certainty of gravity, that the Magician’s Judge will find it. Beau might still take the hit, she might still fly twenty feet backward and into a fucking tree, Jester might have to drag her out of the afterlife by the ankles, but she’s never had to search Yasha’s eyes, bloody at the corners or no, to know that the consequence of her taking a hit is the square focus of Yasha’s rage. And they’ve yet to fight something capable of surviving that.

 

It makes her get disgustingly sappy, even on the ground with her ribs cracked inward like so much eggshell.

Beau’s seen barbarians before. For gods’ sake, she’s trained within an inch of her life to redirect the inherent clumsiness of letting your anger lead your hands.

Rage is a thoughtless thing, it’s incoherent and imprecise and everything Xenoth has called Beau before, and still she knows Yasha’s paying attention to her.

 

(The flat of that wide, wide blade rings like Jester’s creepy bell when it catches the arm swiping at Beau, and she can hear it like its own language, smooth as if spoken. 

A message they’ve never needed to give words.

_ I’ve got you.) _

 

 

That is to say, the first fight goes well.

Even though they both get poisoned, and sort-of eaten.

 

Thank the gods for Jester, she thinks, watching her dig through the haversack for herbs; a minute later Beau almost slaps a hand over her mouth to keep her from wishing good luck to the other group.

-

 

They’re taking up positions for the next round, Jester scrambling onto one of the walls, and Beau feels that sunny-warm glow between her shoulders, the one that Jester always radiates when she’s healing.

 

At her “I love you!” and frazzled blown kiss in Jester’s direction, Yasha’s eye twitches. Beau tries to save that thought for later.

-

 

She watches Yasha pause in reaching for her greatsword. She puts the back of one hand to her mouth— or so Beau thinks, at first, but she sees her knuckles pressed to her chin, against that blue-black line running from lip to throat. When her eyes flutter closed it’s like they vanish into the paint around her eyes.

It seems like too gentle a prayer to a god so restless as Yasha’s, and the sky gives no answer, but her shoulders drop like cut weights from a pulley.

When she turns back to Beau, and as the doors slide open with that dull-metal sound, Beau thinks that Yasha guards like she fights— as much as and in the only way she can.

 

And, well.

Yasha almost fucking dies in that round.

 

 

Beau almost converts, there in the sand with Yasha and Molly crushed into the ground like a new layer of sediment, almost drops to her bloody knees and prays to the Traveler, because Jester has one spell left when she reaches them and she gets to watch Yasha’s eyes open again when she presses her small hands to those pale temples. 

-

 

Later, she’ll look back and wonder if Yasha had been praying to join her wife. 

 

And after that, she’ll ask Yasha if she was, if she still would, and the answer will make her toes curl with warmth.

-

 

_ (“You ever take those mercs up on their offer?” She asks—it’s another night, and Yasha’s laying out the petals of a few small white flowers flat so they bloom full on the page in her book, like caught stars. _

 

_ “What mercs?” Yasha asks, her pale and lovely face curled with confusion in the firelight, and Beau laughs and laughs and laughs.) _

—

 

_you said you would help me _ _,_ and it sounds like her.

 

astrid’s hands were never soft— it’s not her, you  _know_ it’s not her— she tilts your face up and her white-blond hair rushes past your face like the wind is made of gold strands. 

 

_you were supposed to be the strongest __,_ she says,  you were the strongest.

 

her nails on your wrist are sharp, they’re shards of time, silvery-gray, choking. when you cry your tears are beads of flame, they burn your face and hers and lick up the walls. a sweet, familiar embrace, flowers of red and orange in the dark, lovely dark stripes along the floor and bursting the windows. her eyes are gold, they’re yellow. 

 

_you said you would save me _ _,_ and her eyes are the eyes of a cat who was only ever a cat. crying in the dark; her eyes are enormous, saucers— nott wails and her curled little hands claw in the charred wood.

 

she howls when you hold her in the water, covers her face and when you look down your arms— carved open and bleeding like the moon— are locked around a mass of brown skin, skirts and braids and you drop her and she’s caduceus, eyes empty, face-down, the water clouds and she’s molly, pretty and cold and lips stained red. the water is fire, and it eats them so quickly.

 

_you didn’t help them,_ molly says. is it molly?

 

molly not-molly smiles and you try to remember if his horns really curled like that. his lips press at the corner of your mouth. he smells like fire and blood and roses. _you didn’t help them, but you can still help me._

 

his arm winds around yours, the peacock feathers long and soft, and opens your hand like a flower. it’s so dark, and your friends look so cold.

 

_ light them up, pretty. _

 

—

 

“I would be sad if you left, Caduceus.”

 

Jester always draws out that second syllable— Cuh- ** dyoo ** -sus— and he gets lost for a second thinking about how nice one’s name sounds on the tongues of friends, until she squeezes his hand, and oh, he should say something, shouldn’t he?

 

“I wouldn’t really be gone,” he says, and lays his staff across his folded legs. “Friends never really leave you so long as you remember to carry them.”

 

_“ Yes __,_ but,” and Jester shakes her hand free to throw her arms around his waist, butting her head against him like Mr. Caleb’s little orange friend, like a just-fed Clarabelle. Like he’s home, somehow— “I would still be  _sad.”_

 

Caduceus pets her hair, blue-black like sleek raven feathers in the dim light, and thinks for the first time that maybe here, he matters in a different way. He thinks of her skirt pocket, recently emptied of its carbon cargo, how Jester keeps her diamonds on her person and never in the haversack. He thinks of bodies returning to soil, he thinks of laying friends to rest under fallen leaves, mushrooms and aerated earth, and that for these his first friends, these strange, angry people, perhaps his mother’s promise would not be enough to bring them peace.

 

Caduceus thinks of Mollymauk and that coat like a brand against the winter-washed sky, Beau absentmindedly holding one hand to the back of her neck, the amulet hanging between his own collarbones and the way Caleb cradled it in shaking hands when he gifted it to Caduceus, Yasha smiling the distant smile of someone who loved before she lost, and he thinks that maybe, to these loud and angry people, he might also be worth that kind of scar.

 

—

 

“this is the kind of company you keep?” dairon asks, and beau’s heard that tone, it doesn’t cut anymore, but somehow she wasn’t expecting it to come from dairon. dairon who just disguised herself as a drow to beat the shit out of Beau in a bar in a land neither of them belonged to, dairon who laughed when she was being stubborn, dairon who understood that discipline meant action, not inaction. 

dairon who had never called beau insolent, like zenoth, like her parents and _everyone else_ , whose tone sounded like she was about to call jester that.

 

beau looks at jester, jester who doesn’t hear that note to dairon’s words and would shake off the insult in a second, but it doesn’t matter that jester wouldn’t care, because _she_ would. jester’s smile doesn’t fade, and beau watches her, and watches dairon watch her, and she thinks that jester’s exactly the kind of company to keep.

 

caleb, too, even if dairon could punt his ass between the two suns. and deuces, looking tall and wilted with mud running from his hair to his ears, and nott, and fjord, and yasha. 

she thinks dairon actually likes yasha, which, y’know. beau can’t exactly blame her for.

 

what she’s trying to say is, when dairon says she’s surprised they made it out here, it makes her this sort of angry she’s never really had before. angry because maybe dairon could beat _her_ within an inch of her life, but if jester hadn’t been dealing with that ogre they would’ve gotten the upper hand. and if they’d had fjord (even yelling the name of his spells like an idiot), or nott, nott who’s faster than any monk and twice as brave, or cad with his beetles, or caleb rather than frumpkin, or yasha, sword or no, there’d be no question.

 

because beau’s worked alone, and for once she knows she’s learned more than dairon about something because she met jester first and goddammit, she wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her. jester’s dragged her ass back from the brink of the astral plane so many times with her cold hands and her smile pressed to beau’s cheek when her eyes flutter open and her arms so tight they almost re-break beau’s ribs, and before dairon sidles out of that dark, tobacco-damp room she thinks that learning to land like a cat (on her hands and one foot, and beau’s never get cooler than when it actually works) doesn’t mean not letting someone catch you before you hit.

 

—

 

(If we’re being honest, Fjord just thinks Cad’s rolled over and is breathing in his face, at first. It smells just the same: dark, fresh-turned dirt and handfuls of crushed flowers, warm and weirdly nice.)

 

“You know, I don’t take patrons,” the Wildmother says. The sound is like fingers combing through his hair, it’s like feeling his fingertips for the first time in months. “I have no need for eyes in the depths, or gifts of glory, or gladiators. My service is not so hungry.”

 

(And maybe if Fjord were awake, he’d remember to be a little angry about Molly. Molly who Cad fed to the earth with open hand, Molly whose body the Wildmother took for her own in front of them. Maybe he’d remember to ask if she’d give him back. But she’s still combing slow through his hair, shaking loose rimes and rimes of old salt. He didn’t think he’d ever feel anything other than numb, again, and those thoughts are settled at the bottom of the honey-slow soup of his thoughts.)

 

“But maybe I’ll make an exception, just this once. I don’t know that you’re ready to swear to something other than selfishness, little one, and I can wait until you are. You’ll have a good teacher, after all.”

-

 

Fjord dreams of flowers blooming on the sea, and he wakes to steam curling into his face, blown from between cupped grey hands. 

**Author's Note:**

> i wanted to have a place with all of these together, and to be able to add onto every time i wrote one  
> i will absolutely absolutely take requests for these— i’m over on tumblr @ seafleece and i put most of my writing @ moonbeatblues, come yell at me


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